Synopses & Reviews
The is the definitive account of the boldest and most audacious of the legendary underground cartoonists: the taboo busting, eyeball blistering S. Clay Wilson. This first volume contains all of his underground comic stories from and magazine as well as the many adventures of the Checkered Demon, Star-Eyed Stella, and Captain Pissgums, and even his earliest collaborations with William Burroughs. Also: selections from his teenaged and college years, both in comics and painting form. First person accounts from his peers, as well as Wilson's own words, offer a revealing portrait of the artist who hid his shyness behind brash behavior and bluster. This first of a three-volume biography and retrospective gets to the heart and soul of an artist who lived his dreams and his nightmares.
Review
"Ultimately, Wilson is a perfect representative of the dark side of the '60s. His work crackles with the viciousness that was the flip side of flower power. If he has any message to convey, it's that the world is falling apart: that (to quote Yeats by way of Joan Didion) 'the center cannot hold.'" The Globe and Mail
Review
"Thoroughly estimable and highly recommended." Etelka Lehoczky NPR
Review
"...[F]or those readers with sufficiently girded loins, Wilson's art -- and renegade life-story -- will prove a source of unhealthy, vital fascination." R.C. Baker Village Voice
Review
"...S. Clay Wilson's comics are... profoundly underground creations, works by a man who doesn't give two f***s about society, and that frustrates and annoys, offends and angers, brings bile to the throat while also bringing a thrill to the soul. ...[An] outstanding collection of vintage Wilson work... is the best kind of biography of an artist because it gives readers both context and classics. Patrick Rosenkranz, the unparalleled chronicler of the undergrounds, delivers yet another outstanding biography..." Sean Rogers The Globe and Mail
Review
" surveys the early, graphically fecund years of the most outrageous of the original cadre of underground cartoonists. Wilson... turned his id inside out and vomited forth exquisitely crosshatched panels... The best drawings coalesce into orgies of entwined, bulging, wriggling lines -- the grotesque tickling the sublime." WTF Podcast
Review
"Do you remember the first time you saw an S. Clay Wilson panel? It was almost as powerful as your first blowjob. ... S. Clay Wilson was just beautiful filth -- just mind-blowing." Marc Maron
Synopsis
This is a biography of a legendary underground cartoonist (contemporary and collaborator with Robert Crumb), most famous for his Checkered Demon character.
About the Author
S. Clay Wilson, one of the founding members of the Zap comics collective. (Zap is a seminal underground comic book anthology, with contributors like R. Crumb.) He lives in San Francisco.Patrick Rosenkranz is widely acknowledged as one of the premiere scholars of the underground comix movement. His books include Rebel Visions (the most widely-heralded history of the era) and The Artist Himself: A Rand Holmes Retrospective. He lives in Portland, OR.